Facility Management

[Anonymous]

I'm wondering if anyone out there has had any experience with managing (or trying to manage) a single Revit file for a building where multiple firms might be working on different portions of the building.  How does one consolidate all of the multiple firms project standards / families / etc. into one up-to-date project file?

[barthbradley]

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/revit-products/getting-started/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2018/...

[advandes]

Hello, I would be glad to throw my two cents into your question since this is something I deal with ever day. I am an independent Mechanical Design Engineer that provides CAD services to a major Engineering firm who in turn provides Design and Engineering services to a very large facility (I will call LF). LF continually farms out multiple projects in Revit. We have to manage LF's files in order to keep the Revit models up to date and organized. My first question is: Are you the one managing the "Master Revit File(s)?" 

In the mean time if you want, you can watch this video I posted on youtube awhile back to try and help LF manage their files. There may be some information that could give you some ideas...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74Ba3pzMULs&t=10s

[Anonymous]

advandes,

Yes, I am the person who is in charge of mashing all of these projects together.  How do handle all the different family types that would come from multiple firms?  For example: a 3'-0" x 7'-0" door in a 2" wide hollow metal frame can have any number of family names depending on the company it came from.  How do handle combining like-families?

[barthbradley]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Yes, I am the person who is in charge of mashing all of these projects together.  How do handle all the different family types that would come from multiple firms?  For example: a 3'-0" x 7'-0" door in a 2" wide hollow metal frame can have any number of family names depending on the company it came from.  How do handle combining like-families?

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I'm not familiar with the "Mash Together Workflow".  What is it exactly?  Serious question.  What do you mean by "handle combining like-families"?  

[Anonymous]

barthbradley,

What I mean by "combining like-families" is if one company uses only out-of-the-box door families (so using the family name and parameters of the Autodesk provided material) and another company uses a "company standard" modified version (so it might be named something different or might have additional parameters added, such as ADA clearances), how would you go about combining these to the same family (as to not have a collection of different door families for the same type of door)?  Or is it a process of going through all of the changes that were made and keeping a master in-house file your only your companies families?

[RobDraw]

@Anonymous, is one only a couple of people around here that does facilities management. Maybe she can chime in.

[Mistress0fTheDorkness]

My approach to this with Revit is the same as my approach with Autocad. 

You archive the project file exactly as it comes in.

And you make the updates in your master file.

In both instances, there is so much in the files that does not need to be there for the FM consumers, that for your working set, you purge out the vast majority of the content anyway. 

So, no, I'm probably not going to use the different cubicle families or whatever that come in with every renovation (because they're not going to have the exact room bounding properties I need for space management reporting anyway), so it's faster just to reuse what I already have to update only the parts of the renovations that you actually need.

It keeps things consistent, it doesn't introduce unknowns into your model. It might sound tedious, but, in my personal experience, it is usually the way to go. 

I'm always happy to hear of others' experiences, though. 

It has been at least two years since I did a Revit implementation for an FM client, and shoot, nearly 7 years since I was in charge of my old campus' CAD and BIM. 

... now I feel old. 

Anyway, since Autodesk archived their FM forum a few years ago, remember that there are owner / operator - specific topics over here: https://forums.augi.com/forumdisplay.php?519-Facilities-Management-In-Practice

It's not a super busy forum, but, most of the topics do stand up over time.

[Mistress0fTheDorkness]

I've made a topic over there, maybe get some more eyes on your question.